Game On! The Untold Secrets and Furious Egos Behind the Rise of SportsCenter

ESPN wasn't truly the worldwide leader in sports until Keith Olbermann came along. Brilliant, combustible, and allergic to authority, he revolutionized its flagship program—and started a countdown clock for his ugly exit the moment he walked in the door. An exclusive excerpt from a new ESPN oral history

Have Keith Theodore Olbermann spend a few seasons working at your television network and see how you feel. Sort of like Kansas after a twister. If Olbermann hadn't been so brilliant and talented, few would have put up with him. But Olbermann has a talent that can't be taught. He can relate to people on the other side of the camera and, indeed, relate to the camera itself in a way that comes across as second nature. And yet he once told an interviewer that on some level, he's always making fun of television: "Like, 'Look how ridiculous this is, me sitting here and you sitting on the other end, watching me—what are you doing that for?' I think that's always been my attitude." Olbermann agreed to come to ESPN in the spring of 1992 as an anchor for the 11 p.m. SportsCenter. In the last year of his contract with KCBS Los Angeles—which the station chose not to renew—he had been making $475,000. His starting salary in Bristol would be just over $150,000.

Keith Olbermann

Anchor

When I was at CNN, we used to look at ESPN as our comic relief, because for a long time, in terms of sports news, CNN was a ten-times-better product than ESPN. I used to look at my old friend [Chris] Berman sweating away in the studio without a teleprompter, trying to read his notes. I thought, Thank God that there's somebody on the air in worse shape than we are. And then I finally figured out how they survived for nearly a decade with no funding: They were in the middle of nowhere. Across the street was a McDonald's, what was always reputed to be a toxic-waste area, and cows. So unless you're a freelance dairyman, there was no place else to go.

Bob Ley

Anchor

I still remember the lunch when [ecutive vice presidents] John Walsh and Steve Anderson were deciding whether they were going to hire Keith. I said, "You're aware of his reputation, aren't you?" They said, "Oh, it's not going to be like that. He's not making all that much money." I said, "It's not a function of money. Know what you're buying." When he arrived, Keith had one thing in mind: It was Keith. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that.

Olbermann

One night right after we started, swamped by the work and a little jealous that CNN was just a thirty-minute show and we were doing an hour, I said, during a commercial, off air, to Dan [Patrick], "This is a BIG fucking show." He laughed, I laughed, and so I figured I'd get him to giggle on the air by saying, "When this BIG…show continues." The next day, a dozen people came up to one or both of us and said, "The big show!"

Dan Patrick

Anchor

I remember we did it for a while and the guys on the six o'clock—Bob Ley, Robin Roberts, and Charley Steiner—didn't like the fact that we called it "The Big Show," like we thought we were better.

Olbermann

It was never personal with Charley. I think Bob resented it, and Robin couldn't have cared less. And management was saying, "We don't want you putting an individual stamp on your SportsCenter." I was thinking, Yeah, right, that boat sailed already, too.

Walsh

We had one huge editorial blowout. Huge, huge, huge. It was the July Fourth weekend, and they were going off the rail; it was crazy. So we had a meeting. One of the points of the meeting was, "You can have your nickname, but when you're going to break, it's SportsCenter." So Keith said, "What do you want us to say, just 'This is SportsCenter'?" I said, "Yeah, that'll be just fine." So they started to say, "This is SportsCenter." It was Keith sticking it to us, because he was going to promote it in the least promotable way: "This is SportsCenter."

Patrick

We got a tongue-lashing, pounding on the desk, the whole thing. Walsh was pissed. I walked out of that meeting—at the time I had two children, maybe three—and I remember saying, "Oh, my God, I'm going to get fired." We're three steps out of the conference room, and I ask Keith, "What do you think?" and he says, "Fuck them!" I said, "What?" And he looks at me and says, "Fuck them." And I said, "All right."

Mike McQuade

Vice president of production

I think at some point someone in marketing must have heard that, and that's how it ended up becoming This is SportsCenter.

Walsh

And it turned out to be the biggest ad campaign in the history of cable television.

Patrick

It was all about who had control. I don't think they liked making stars out of us. As Keith and I were told one time, "We don't need another Berman." Chris had established himself as unique and passionate, bold and fun, and I think they were worried that Keith and I were sort of levitating above everybody else.

Olbermann

I was approached about ESPN2 in the late spring of '93, so I had only been on the air doing SportsCenter for a year. I was told it was going to be the younger, hip version of ESPN. My initial reaction to this was, "Are you sure you want me to do this, and do you want to break this team up?" They were essentially splitting the audience in half—building another stadium next door, all these analogies. About a week before we premiered, Walsh asked me a weird question: "Do you know which TV show has the largest percentage of its viewers under the age of 25?" I guessed something on MTV. "Nope! The 11 p.m. SportsCenter!" Needless to say, I was newly confused about what ESPN2 was for. "I want to move that audience over there and keep SportsCenter for adults!" That wasn't my first hint of disaster, but it was one of the biggest ones. You do not "move" audiences.

Vince Doria

Vice president of news

Keith was standing outside the building one day in a leather jacket and [ecutive vice president John] Lack came running up to him and said, "You need to wear that on the set." It's a good thing he wasn't wearing a mink stole.

Olbermann

The reason I was wearing that awful leather jacket was because it was so cold in the ESPN2 studio. It had to have been fifty-five degrees in there. It was an icebox.

Charley Steiner

Anchor

The problem about the birth of ESPN2 was, you can't try and be hip; either you are or you aren't. It's that simple. But putting poor old Keith in a black leather jacket like he's heading for a dominatrix studio, come on!

As opening night for the new network and the launch of its flagship series, SportsNight, grew closer, the atmosphere around ESPN2 was filled with doubt and trepidation. On the morning after a September 26 dry run that Olbermann considered a medley of calamities, he fired off a three-page single-spaced memo on what went wrong. Since Olbermann is such an erudite and accomplished writer, the memo reads beautifully. It also says the show sucks. "It is not an expansion on SportsCenter but an apparent redundancy," he wrote, adding that although the ecutives had said they wanted a "loose" show with byplay, interaction, and ad-libbing, the actual program was produced more like "a concentration camp."

Suzy Kolber

SportsNight co-anchor

The night before we went on the air, they were still making major, major changes. We were all in this giant room while they were doing it, and I vaguely remember Keith sitting on the floor in the corner. I just felt that Keith was an unhappy person. He made a lot of people unhappy around him. I'm sure he made me unhappy.

Olbermann

Lack came to me no more than an hour before the first show and said, "Walsh doesn't know what the fuck he's doing." Which was true, but it was not inclusive enough. What I meant to say to him was, "None of you know what the fuck you're doing. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I don't know what I'm going to say in an hour."

Mitch Albom

SportsNight contributor

The network began on a Friday night. We were sitting in the dark waiting for the lights to come up, and I remember thinking, "Wow, this is the start of a network. I'm part of history here." And with that thought in mind, the lights come up and Keith Olbermann, wearing a leather coat, says, "Welcome to the end of my career."

Michael Mandt

Production assistant

I was working the teleprompter for that first show, and I can tell you that first line of Keith's was not on the prompter.

In February 1994, word came that Olbermann would be liberated from ESPN2's SportsNight and would return to his royal roost on SportsCenter. It was precisely what Olbermann—as well as the network's fans, including many college and pro athletes—had been hoping for.

Olbermann

I paid the ransom money. Faced with the option of being stuck on this show, whatever their demand was—$25,000 less per year, add another two years to my contract—I had no choice. I wasn't happy about it, but I said, "All right, let me just get out of it."

Bill Wolff

Producer

Chris Berman made that place. But the guy who made ESPN a household word, the guy who made ESPN mean something in the market to everyone, was Keith Olbermann. God, he was a genius. He just reinvented sportscasting by being the smartest guy who ever did it. And watching him in the mid-'90s was a pleasure. It was appointment viewing: What was Olbermann going to say that night?

McQuade

I'd do the rundown, and Keith would sit behind me and say, "Are you almost done?" In thirty-five minutes he had written the entire show. It was insane. And that happened every day. See, for me, that was fun, because as long as you were, as he put it, "on the raft," you were good, meaning you were in with him.

Patrick

I remember [producer] Gus Ramsey and Mike McQuade would always say, "Are you still in the life raft?" If they had screwed up with Keith, then they would be excommunicated. You didn't know from day to day if you were on or off, and it was tough for them, because they didn't have the power to say to Keith, "Hey, stop; grow up." Everything he did was personal. And that was what made him great. And if he felt like you had just turned on him, then you had actually turned on him, and that was something that was very, very deep to him.

Rich Eisen

Anchor

When I got there, I was obviously very much influenced by Keith's style, and everything I did, I tried to make a joke. So I walked by Keith one day in the hallway, and he goes to me, "Nope, not yet," and kept walking. About three days later, I walked past him again and he goes, "Nope, not yet." So I finally asked him, "Keith, what do you mean?" He goes, "You're not even close to doing this show the way you should be doing it or can do it." So one day I get an interoffice envelope, and it's a cover letter from Keith basically saying, "I got this letter from a fan." It was a three-page letter to Keith essentially saying, "Who is this new guy on SportsCenter? Why has he hijacked my program?" And Keith's cover letter said, "Don't take this personally, but he has a point." I was absolutely crestfallen. So I went to Keith and said, "I don't know how to respond to this." He said, "Listen, just do one highlight without a joke. Just one. Then try to do one segment without a joke. Then do an entire show where you go home and say, 'That was the most boring show I've ever done.' And do that for an entire week." He essentially gave me the long-standing concept of less is more. Hands down the best advice I've ever been given.

Karl Ravech

Anchor

I've never seen anybody do SportsCenter as well as Olbermann. Nobody. It hasn't even been close.

Patrick

I remember when Olbermann said to me, "Do you know how much this job is worth?" And I said no. He said, "It's worth a million fucking dollars." Keith looked at it as a businessman, saying, "Do you know what they're making off of this?"

Olbermann

Based on the reported profits of the Today show and the salaries of its key figures, a fair ratio was to pay your talent a total figure of about 10 percent of their show's profits. Working off numbers I had gotten from a sales guy in the N.Y.C. office, I calculated that the correct salaries for Dan and me were about $2,750,000 a year. And a year and a half later, Fox offered me a contract for something like $2,813,000 a year. The top salary paid to anybody doing SportsCenter had been whatever I was getting, which I think topped out around $310,000 a year.

Jack Edwards

Anchor

The number one thing that surprised me about ESPN was how little team spirit there was for a place that said that its business was sports. If I said "I think you're wrong" to someone who was higher in the organizational chart than I was, what I would get back was "You're not a team player." And on more than one occasion I responded, "When's the last time you wore a jockstrap?" A team is where you have your teammate's back regardless of what happens; you defend them and you sort out any dirty laundry quietly behind closed doors. There was almost none of that at ESPN. There was no encouragement, because the atmosphere was one of stick the knife in his back, climb the corporate ladder. It was a very, very negative place to work. Don't believe the mascot promos. Life is not like that at SportsCenter. The prevailing idea was that the network was much more important than individuals. In many ways, Chris Berman is their greatest nightmare, because he is a fabulously talented, extraordinarily hardworking, obsessed, dedicated, funny man who relates directly one-on-one to everyone who's ever watched him on television. They have done everything in their power to prevent anybody from getting that kind of power again. Their greatest corporate nightmare is to need someone more than that person needs ESPN.

Herb Granath

ESPN chairman

I was enraged by Olbermann. Guys like that just piss me off, you know, because there's no loyalty. It's just me, me, me. There was no choice but to get rid of him.

Wolff

Keith and authority don't get along—ever. But he can also be one of the most loyal employees. Do not take a shot at Keith's guys; he will protect them, always. But he was hard to manage—I mean hard! Keith is a dark guy. If you take everything Keith says at face value, you will find your reason for living diminished.

Puckishly titled The Big Show, Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick's dual memoir was an attempt to put between covers the kind of crowd-pleasing tomfoolery they did on the air together. ESPN protocol requires on-air talent to get permission before appearing on other networks, and though Olbermann knew the rule, he didn't bother to ask anybody before joining former ESPN comrade Craig Kilborn on Comedy Central's The Daily Show to promote the book. Olbermann further irked ESPN officials when, asked by Kilborn to name "the most godforsaken place" in the eastern United States, Olbermann blurted out, "Bristol, Connecticut." Walsh suspended Olbermann for two weeks—with pay.

Ley The message being sent? "For misbehaving, he gets another two weeks off with pay to think about whether he wants to stay here or take a better offer." And he took the better offer.

Howard Katz

Ecutive vice president

Keith is as talented as anybody I've ever worked with. But he was a terribly unhappy person while he was up in Bristol. First of all, he was single. He didn't drive. What kind of social life can you possibly have? He was not a happy camper up there, and it showed. People just didn't want to work with him anymore; he was tearing the newsroom apart. Keith had to fight management on every single point. So [in 1997] I finally came to the conclusion that despite his brilliance and talent, we would be better off without Keith. I didn't fire Keith; I just chose not to renew his contract. Keith did not respond well—although I'm sure it didn't come as a surprise.

Ley

I saw Walsh in the hallway, and I said, "Our long national nightmare is over, huh?" We felt not so much relief when Keith left as unrestrained fucking joy. And it may not be fair to him, because I don't know what his issues are. Some of what happened with him back then is romanticized, but there are still people there who remember how people were treated, spoken to, referred to, and no amount of subsequent gentle behavior is going to erase that.

Walsh

One thing most people don't know: In a ratings sense, the eleven o'clock SportsCenter's highest-rated year was when Dan Patrick and Bob Ley were hosting—not Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann.

Rece Davis

Anchor

There was a rumor a few years ago that maybe Keith would come back, and one of our coordinating producers said, "I think it would be a good idea but with one caveat. He first has to stand in the reception area, and everybody who wants to gets to come up and punch him in the stomach."

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